According to Baron Ferdinand Marterer, Schönburg-Hartenstein was suggested as a candidate for imperial minister of defense by chief of the general staff Arz von Straussenberg in April 1917.[2] In early 1918, as domestic unrest over the war and continuing shortages of food increased within Austria-Hungary, he was appointed to command troops to maintain security within the empire by Emperor Karl I.[3] In this capacity, he arrested strike leaders and 44,000 military deserters.[4] In the summer of 1918, he again took combat command, leading the 6th Army in Northern Italy during the Battle of the Piave River, in which he was wounded in the leg.[4] As the Austro-Hungarian political and military situation became ever more precarious in the fall of 1918, Prince Alois expressed a realization of the coming end of the war and the monarchy, writing his family that "[my] remaining duty is to preserve discipline and protect the new Austria."[5]

Following the fall of the Habsburg monarchy and the establishment of republican Austria, he was the state secretary of the army from September 1933 to March 1934, when he was appointed to the post of defense minister in the cabinet of Engelbert Dollfuss, a position he held until July 1934. While in government, he appealed to Austrian nationalists and veterans to support the Dolfuss administration and oppose pro-German National Socialism.[6]